The Coursing: A climate-catastrophe video poem

A meeting point of human and machine, The Coursing transforms observations of rising waters to reimagine a poetics in resilience to rising waters. Filmed largely from kayak along industrialized shores, the work takes a sensorial approach, seeking language to respond to unstable conditions.
Immersing viewers into a kaleidoscope of climate futures, The Coursing confronts the logic and consequences of industrialization, particularly petro-chemical industrialization, while also drawing attention to how these systems may shape our human relationships to the natural world. The work gives space to witness and name those experiences.
The Coursing was filmed by Roderick Coover along industrial and post-industrial shorelines of the US Atlantic and northern Europe in areas predicted to go underwater in the decades ahead. The images are combined using poetic, constraint-based coded structures to reflect human-nonhuman interactions that shape actuality. The algorithmic montage combines with field recordings, voices, electronic music and generative sound composed by Adam Vidiksis. A computational, poetic text designed by Nick Montfort draws from Coover's field observations to build a poetics of utterance around the unspeakable threats posed by floods to memory, time and belonging.